You Eat Gar?

Whenever folks on Dad’s Mississippi Delta farm saw my boyhood best friend and mentor Jaybird “whuppin’ gars” early in the morning, they hoped to be sitting at his supper table later that day. The old black man could cook anything to gustatory perfection, even garfish, which most folks consider inedible. Unchanged since the Jurassic Period, gars are bony on the inside with thick skin and scales on the outside. In a nearby creek, Jaybird caught gars on trotlines baited with gar hors d’oeuvres: putrefied carp chunks. To determine if the catch was edible, he used a short piece of four-inch-diameter pipe. If a gar’s body was too thick to pass through the pipe, bones in his flesh would be difficult to chew, whereas bones in flesh of gars that passed through the pipe would be soft like cartilage, and therefore edible.

---

Support Canada Free Press

---